


That Makes a House a Home

by shinychimera, Yeomanrand



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: A Study in Pink - Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Asexual Character, Asexual Molly Hooper, Chocolate Box Exchange 2018, Dragonlock, Familiar Greg, Familiar Sherlock, Friends to family, Friendship, Gen, Magic, Mention of Archie, Mention of Major Sholto, Mrs. Hudson as anatomy professor, Not a Harry Potter crossover, POV Female Character, POV Third Person Limited, Present Tense, tw: mention of suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-08
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-03-15 08:50:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13609839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinychimera/pseuds/shinychimera, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yeomanrand/pseuds/Yeomanrand
Summary: A woman's mind stands all alone,a brilliant heart in search of home.Which house of magic is the placeto stand her ground and make her case?She'll find her purpose and her team,in London, in the Age of Steam.





	That Makes a House a Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Deejaymil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/gifts).



Molly Hooper sits on the grass in her aunt's garden, reading a heavy leather-bound anatomy grimoire. The graphic diagrams would horrify the others in her adopted household, but she cradles the smuggled tome with the same tenderness she might show her wee second-cousin Archie. Her legs are folded just so beneath her skirts, such that no one might be scandalized by a bare ankle or a pale kneecap. Since girlhood, her aunt has never failed to remind her of the proprieties expected of a woman grown; as of her birthday today, she is a young lady in fact instead of _in potentia_.

Molly's dragon Erlock lies draped around her neck like a stole, incongruous onyx against the pale leaf green of her dress. He is catching up with the page she's already read twice; his eyes are bright and hard as gemstones but their color is as uncertain as the cold ocean beyond the manor walls. She absently brings one hand up and scratches where he likes best, just behind his jaw where it rests above her breast.

"You can turn the page now," he says, a low rumble with the faintest hint of coal. "Let's not waste the light."

Molly sighs, and the scratching shifts to a gentle chuck of her knuckle against the bone. Fourteen years since the egg she dug up from the ocean's sand had cracked open and he, nameless and still wet with albumen, had slid across her three-year-old palms. Fourteen years, and it never fails to astonish her: the sleekness of his scales beneath her hands, the heat of his blood beneath, the keen _presence_ of his living mind within, which has led her to explore beyond all sorts of proprieties. Most of all, she treasures the silent devotion and affection they share every day.

She turns the page.

☀

The supper table shows no hint of birthday celebration, when Molly enters the dining hall with Erlock slipping unnoticed around her heels — the same pewter ware, one of the same fifteen meals that are all Lizbet has ever cooked, no aroma of sweet treats drifting from the kitchen. Only a narrow letter on fine linen paper, its four-paneled seal already broken, rests by Molly's plate to acknowledge the date.

She sits straight and polite in her chair, keeping the tremble of anticipation locked tight in her throat, so that it doesn't mar the ladylike impression of elegance in the fingers that extricate the letter and slowly unfold it. Her aunt watches her shrewdly, both of them pretending the letter hasn't already been read, likely as soon as it reached the house. Erlock has surged up the chair leg under the damask tablecloth, and his tiny claws prick an excited dance against her thigh.

Her skin tingles with some strange admixture of relief — no one is ever guaranteed a placement — and her own thrill at seeing the pale white and blue crest at the top of the paper. 

"Wintermorn," she informs her aunt. "I'm going."

Her aunt's moue of disappointment is less about Molly leaving than her destination. Wintermorn is the least powerful of the Schools of Magic, but it is the most practical and scientific of London's four, and thus the best suited to Molly and Erlock's respective natures. But Molly knows her aunt had hoped for a better return on the investment of her time in raising Molly.

Vernaldays is a forbidding athenaeum for the theoretical sciences and theology or philosophy — Molly might snag a rector with a tidy set of tithes, or the archdeacon of a diocese, or even a fellow of the Royal Society, perhaps one of those the queen showers with favours. Even better would be Summereve, the well-feathered nesting ground for notaries, barristers, civil servants, and the lesser progeny of the aristocracy; husbands aplenty for Molly amongst the future royal clerks and judges and members of Parliament. Reapingsnight would expose her to less fame and more money; it is a towering structure for military officers and the intelligence corps, captains of industry and their shipbuilders and engineers. 

But Wintermorn is home to the practical sciences like architecture, clockwork, and apothecary; and the even more practical arts, like cookery, finesmithing and woodworking — and to those whose hearts most often belong to their work and not to other people.

Molly feels a great bubble of joy swell up inside her, strong enough to burst through her ribs; feels like scooping Erlock from beneath the table-skirts and dancing around the room. Instead, she remains courteously until the end of the meal, and disguises the slivers of chicken that disappear from her fork into her lap until a quarter of her dinner has been forfeited — because Erlock was absolutely right about which school would reach out to Molly and call her home.

☀

Despite the lightness on the horizon and in her soul, Molly's heart aches about standing alone on the spire, waiting to board the airship destined to take her — and a handful of other non-Londoners selected for Wintermorn — to the cloistered campus in the city. Her aunt and cousin have not come out see her off, and have ruled little Archie too young to attend even in his nanny's care; her uncle is somewhere else in the skies.

She blinks away pointless frustration to watch the airship descend delicately as a soap bubble, until the waiting crew can set long hooks to pull her steady against the loading platform. Erlock pushes off from her shoulders and for a brief throat-closing moment she thinks he's leaving her too, but instead he dances and bobs in the air, the thin membrane of his wingspread showing off the dark iridescence of pearl mussel shells.

"A dragon," the airship steward helping with her chest says wonderingly. "You've brought us a bit of fair luck, Miss Hooper. Dragons are good for airships like dolphins for sea vessels, but so much rarer."

Molly dips her head awkwardly, smiling at their feet. She tries to wait for Erlock, but has to go belowdecks with the steward to find her room while he continues to dart about, observing the ship from every angle.

He finds his way through her open cabin window shortly before bedtime.

"You were lovely," she says.

He preens, and begins telling her all the details he could see of decks and portholes and rigging and rudders, until she's pieced together a good mental picture of the ship and its workings. In return, she tells him about the crew and passengers she has met, and her meal at the captain's table, and to his delight hands over a few tidbits she'd kept back from her supper. She falls asleep listening to his rumbling observations of their new world, a sound he's used to lull her since she was a young orphan struggling to sleep in a strange house.

☀

Some things don't change within Wintermorn's ivied walls. Even amongst dozens on dozens of people who don't quite fit, Molly doesn't quite fit — not with the earnest young doctors-to-be, mostly men, who are taken aback by her fluency with bone and muscle and vein; not with the effervescent alchemists, who coax magic and matter to flow together in strange-smelling brews; not even with the printmakers who lovingly tend the ever-growing library she loves to get lost in.

Definitely not with the other young ladies, all sharp-witted and eager for their education but, in their own ways, just as wrapped up as her cousin had been with coteries of friends, and the attentions of young gentlemen, and the occasional flares of conflict or true love in the winding staircases. Molly knows none of them are here merely to get a husband; they all have greater ambitions for their skills and magics, but she has trouble comprehending their preoccupations with other people when all she wants to do is dive deep in pursuit of every wriggling flash of her curiosity, or Erlock's. None of her peers have familiars, and Erlock seems as invisible to many of them as he ever was to her aunt.

At least here there is neither suspicion nor condemnation of Molly's solitary and studious ways — no one chides or ignores her, rather most of them simply acknowledge her desire for lack of clutter in her life. 

With time, the dormitory begins to feel less strange and more homely and Molly grows in confidence. The rest of her classmates' magic is best suited to alchemy and chemistry and cooking, or botany and biology and mystical ways to navigate on the ocean or in the sky without starlight. But Molly's magic draws her to pathology and anatomy. She has always wanted to know how bodies work, and with Erlock's continual encouragement learned more on her own than many of her professors; now she wants to learn the causes of death, how they show in the body, and how to speak for the murdered dead.

One afternoon, she goes to the library to review Professor Hudson's latest anatomy reading, only to find another student, male, with sandy blonde hair, already leaning over the book.

"Hello," Molly says with a little curtsey. She's gotten better about eye contact, so she looks in his face as she stumbles over her next question. "You're — you're new?"

"Miscategorized," he answers with a cheerful shrug and a smile that doesn't crinkle the corners of his eyes. Erlock picks up his head and the man's eyes widen slightly; Erlock gets a respectful nod. "My letter came from Reapingsnight, but after two years of banging my head against their wall, Headmaster Major Sholto finally agreed I would be more at home here, instead."

He steps forward, and she notices a tiny silver mound of fur against the rising curve of his neck, not a tumor or a mole — could it be? — and the traces of a limp, the depth of his crow's feet, the throat that tenses to form a hard 'c' sound, and not a 'j', as he holds out a weathered hand for a shake-among-equals. "John Watson, at your service."

Erlock comments acidly that John is beginning his education a bit late.

John shrugs, and his smile rises, broadens into something honest and light. Erlock startles when the silver mouse-kin Molly had noticed pulls its nose out of John's ear.

"Oi," it — he — says, clawed toes gripping tight in the creamy wool of John's jumper. "No call to be rude."

"This is Greg," John says, by way of introduction. "I'm a bit deaf, and he helps me out."

Molly welcomes both of them, stumbling a little but honestly glad to meet another soul at least a little like herself. Erlock grumbles, and she gently brushes her fingertips over the fine scales along the underside of his neck.

"Were you sent to Afghanistan before you got your letter?" she asks, curious about the delay in his education.

"I beg your pardon?" John says, with a stunned blink — but he doesn't sound angry or offended, just confused.

"Oh, I'm — I'm sorry. It's just, well, you almost called yourself either 'corporal' or 'captain'. Captain, I think; it's in the way your shoulders just settled. And your hands are just a bit darker than your wrists — not really tan anymore but skin's funny that way. But I guess you'd know that, too. Plus you said two years at Reapingsnight. And so I thought, military, a little older than me, and the front's in either Afghanistan or Iraq so the question is when you were...sent."

She slows to a stop and swallows, as Greg tilts his head back and forth before leaning in to chitter near-silently into John's ear. She feels her cheeks redden under their combined attention. Erlock pushes the top of his head against her chin and she automatically scratches his cheek in return before finishing her thought.

"And Afghanistan because there's a colony of English mouse-kin there, not in Iraq."

"Brilliant," John says in astonishment, and Greg, acknowledged as more than an enchanted mouse, grooms his whiskers in nodding agreement.

"It's not," she starts, and Erlock makes a soft growl. "Thank you. Sorry. People aren't usually impressed."

☀

John ought to be a doctor himself — it's clear he's been aiding soldiers in the field, and he has an intuitive knack for how to ease pain, find the most damaged part of limb or organ swiftly, and choose the best treatment. But he has a lot of catching up to do in formal medical education, and is visibly relieved to accept Molly's apprehensive offer to tutor him through the gross dissection class. She's just as relieved to find him easy company, focused on the cadaver and the knowledge she feeds him, rather than flirtation or idle chit-chat; he's also untroubled by the shirt and trousers she wears in the laboratory to replace her confining and interfering dresses.

Today's case is a strange one though, and Molly frowns at the body donated to the school by the city morgue: an unidentified London citizen, female, unclaimed by any family. Erlock drapes far enough down Molly's front that his claws prickle through her waistcoat. The puzzle of who the woman was distracts her from the familiar pinpricks of his claw-tips. Molly has already noted the goodly length of her bones and that she has nearly all of her teeth; her waist and ribs show the characteristic malformation of a tightly-worn corset.

"So much pink," Erlock says, wrapping his tail around Molly's arm to anchor himself more firmly. "Pink nail lacquer, pink lipstick, traces of pink fibers probably from her clothing."

"She must have liked the colour," Molly says. "They said suicide?" 

Corpses are difficult to come by and they take turns between notes and autopsy; John, making the careful incisions in the body, nods. Something about 'suicide' as cause of death doesn't sit right with Molly; she's never encountered such a case before but, as Erlock noted, what little they can observe of who she was before her death suggests she at the very least took care over her appearance. Molly supposes that might not mean anything — after all, as a young woman of class she also took pains over her appearance. Still does, during the holidays when she is in her aunt's house. And the heavens know she's weathered her own moments of misery and desperation.

"I want to try a spell, John," she warns, and he sets the scalpel aside and takes a step away to give her space.

Molly traces her finger from the back of the head, roughly proximate to the medulla oblongata, along the forehead and eyebrows, the pattern slow and careful, just as she's been taught.

John and Erlock both watch her, Erlock with the intense curiosity he's always shown about anything she does; Greg, as usual, is face-first in John's ear. The colors rise behind Molly's finger; John and Erlock make startled noises when Molly raises _pink_ again. Intense, but sickly, like the cheeks of a feverish child. 

"Not suicidal," Molly says, picking up her pen and making a careful note in the chart. "Afraid."

"Of what?" John asks, frowning at her as he fingers the back of his scalpel, ready to resume the Y-shaped incision.

Molly considers the cadaver, eyes focused somewhere between the real details and her imagined extrapolations. Erlock shakes his wings out and drapes himself back over her shoulders (his preferred position ever since he was a tiny fingerling just hatched and utterly dismayed that three-year-old Molly had called him a _fishie_ ). 

There are no outward signs, of course there aren't. No bruises, peri- or post-mortem, no marks of ligature nor signs of smothering. She's still learning all the ways poison might be detected alchemically, but she traces a similar spell up the torso and her magic offers her the foul ghost of acidic vomitus, tracing from belly to throat. 

"Whoever made her poison herself," she says firmly. Then she blinks herself back to the real world. "Could we get access to her police file, do you think?"

"Let's ask Professor Hudson," John says, on the verge of setting his scalpel aside, but Molly shakes her head.

"After we finish," she says with a tiny gesture at the corpse. This cadaver — this woman — this _murder victim_ must be given a full chance to speak her piece, to give them all the facts she can, before they can lay her body to rest.

☀

Professor Hudson is of the opinion that delivering their autopsy report to the police will suffice and, although Molly takes pains to dress herself as a young lady ought when visiting the Metropolitan police, no one takes her report seriously. Too young, she fumes on the cab ride back to Wintermorn, too female, and the (presumably _weak_ ) woman in pink having too obviously committed suicide in their eyes — and Molly is very glad she insisted Erlock stay with John and Greg while she made the request.

She's near enough to breathing fire herself (or bursting into shameful frustrated tears) by the time she's rather definitively dismissed.

She storms into John's room, where John and Greg and Erlock pore over layers of yellowing newspapers spread across the table. John takes one look at her face and heads for the kettle; Erlock launches to meet her, wraps himself in his characteristic drape around her shoulders and spits venomous imprecations. 

"Erlock's not wrong," John says, waiting for her to sit before handing her a cup of steaming tea. She looks up into his sea-changeable eyes to find them steel-grey; his lips are a thin line.

"You're angry, too," she blurts out.

"Yeah," he says. "I am. You're the smartest person I've ever met, and they might not have known how damn clever you are when you walked in but they sure as _hell_ — begging your pardon — should have picked it up after talking to you for five minutes."

Erlock has stopped his dire invective and lifted his head into Molly's peripheral vision, staring at John. For his part, John reaches out and gently uses the saucer to lift Molly's hands slightly closer to her face, where the bitter scent of the tea encourages her to take a careful sip.

"People really aren't usually impressed," Erlock says. Molly takes a second sip. "They think she's pulling some sort of trick, or that I'm feeding her information somehow. But not you."

John shakes his head and sits down with his knees almost but not quite touching Molly's, where he can be at eye-level with Erlock.

"Not me," he says, soberly.

Molly draws in a deep breath and lets it out slowly; the lingering steam from the tea almost seems like smoke from her lips. She takes a deeper swallow and the last of the shakes, anger and embarrassment leave her. She reaches up to brush the leading edge of Erlock's wing. He immediately turns and strokes her cheek with the top of his head.

"We've been digging back in the newspapers and you were right," John says. "There were at least two more; a boy and a councilman, both of whom were found in places they didn't belong."

Molly's fingers tighten on the handle of her cup. "The murderer has done this before. He — or she — is sure, now, that they won't be caught. That means there will likely be more, if no one will listen."

She finishes the last sip of the tea and sets cup and saucer aside, thinking furiously. Logic ought to sway anyone, but no one at the Yard was listening to the logic, because it was coming from _her_.

Someone _must_ listen, or more people will die. She swallows bitterly, looks up again at John. "Will you try?"

John winces but considers for a long moment, hand stroking over his chin. Ultimately, he shakes his head.

"I could, but they'd end up asking questions about what I know, and how, that I wouldn't be able to answer. No matter how much information you give me up front," he adds, regretfully.

She twists her fingers together, frowning, and then gets up quickly enough that Erlock has to backwing not to be thrown off her shoulder; his tail twists firmly around her bicep. She starts to pace. There has to be an answer, probably a simple one, but she just can't see it.

An in-person meeting won't work, obviously, even if she tries to go to the detectives' superiors; she's already tried logic and John is right about the questions — the last thing she wants is for _him_ to be arrested because someone thinks he knows too much about the killings, if he can't explain enough of the details they've deduced. Her uncle's name might open one or two doors but, when the story inevitably came to light, her aunt would be the kind of scandalized that might result in Molly being dragged back to her aunt's with her education incomplete.

"We could write a letter," she says, aloud, realizing she's fallen into one of her silences. Except John and Greg are waiting, patiently. Erlock pets her cheek with the top of his head. "To the detectives, or their captain. Lay out the evidence for all three murders, and the logic that connects them, step by step, so they can't possibly disagree. They wouldn't know it was a woman's argument until they got to the end. Or I could just use my initials. Or leave it unsigned…"

The thought rankles enough that she trails off crossly.

John leans back in his chair, his eyes gone thoughtful, blue-gray like the beginnings of dawn. "It's not just one police officer we need to convince to change their minds about you. It's the whole force. It's everyone."

She wants to throw her hands up in futility. This may be new thinking to John, that life is being systematically unfair to Molly for no good reason — but it's the fabric of her entire existence, of every woman's existence. He couldn't solve it in a year or a century. None of them can solve it in time to stop another murder.

But he looks so excited; leans forward and pulls the evening paper from where it had got wedged between the sofa cushions.

"Public opinion, that's the ticket. We're not going to write to Scotland Yard. We're going to write a series of letters to the papers. We're going to lay out the case with every detail of your brilliance intact, until people are beating on the Yard's doors demanding to know why they aren't being protected from this murderer, why they haven't brought this reclusive genius in to help."

Molly blinks and sits abruptly on the nearest chair; Erlock slithers into her lap.

"We — what?" She's rolling the idea around in her head, though, liking the edges she's starting to see come into shape. "They can't be anonymous letters, though. No one but the yellowest of journalists will take that seriously. Or worse, they'll think the letters are written by the killer."

Erlock's crest has lifted, something that happens only when he's unusually excited. "We temporarily invent someone fictional, someone they _will_ take seriously. Yes, John!"

"That's the beauty of it — we create a fictional detective, an amalgam of the four of us. But when the Met do finally reach out to us for help, it'll be you who has the answers, not me and not the character. You'll shift their opinion by _doing_ what you _do_ so brilliantly, not by changing their minds about who you are."

She sighs, some of her own excitement tempered at the thought.

"Molly — I know the world feels too big to change all at once. Right now, we want a chance to save people, a person. One life a time, and not just as doctors."

She stares down at her hands in a daze, and reaches out to prick her fingertip on one of Erlock's spines. He folds them again before she can draw blood, watching her with gem-like regard.

"Maybe we could keep the fictional detective around," she says, slowly because her mind is twisting and turning all the permutations and possibilities. The unfairness of the world doesn't frighten her as much as being withdrawn from school by her aunt in scandal and disgrace.

She looks around at the three of them, though; a slow realization creeping over her like the sun peeling free of the horizon. John would help her stay, despite her aunt. And she's an adult, anyway. London is her _home_ now, and no one can take that away from her. Letters in the paper are a brilliant idea, and she realizes she's already starting to draft out the pertinent parts in her head.

The four of them: John's kind intelligence, Erlock's eager curiosity, her own leaps of insight, Greg's quiet steadfastness. They can do so much, brought together like iron and carbon in a crucible into a, a, consulting detective. That will do for a fictional title, for now.

"You're right," she says, lightness and resolve breaking free of the clouds somewhere inside her. "You're absolutely right, John. But I hope you're ready to take dictation."

He smiles at her, nodding; Greg flicks his whiskers forward, and Erlock resumes his perch on her shoulders. She turns her head to bump foreheads with him and he, too, makes a happy little rumble.

_Home. And family._ John and Greg, she and Erlock.... She smiles.

"Let's call him Sherlock," she says. "Our detective. Sherlock Holmes."

☀

**Author's Note:**

> Not beta read or Britpicked — I did the best I could but can't guarantee I got everything right! Comments are writer chow, kudos are delightful treats.   :)
> 
> Dearest Deejaymil, I hope hope hope you enjoyed this strange little story!


End file.
